Main Menu

Search form

Fake Jewish Community of Chechnya Condemns Israel

Chechnya is a Muslim country. There are few non-Muslims left there for obvious reasons. The authorities are a rough cross between warlords and Jihadists.

While Islamists in the West can find leftist useful idiots to condemn Israel, what happens when you're really short of Jews? You just fake some.

While Russia’s mainstream Jewish leaders in Moscow firmly backed Israel’s actions in clashes this week with Palestinians at Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, the small Jewish community of Chechnya broke ranks with them and boldly condemned the Jewish state’s “provocations” against Muslims in the holy city.

Just one problem, the "community" seems to consist of one guy whose organizational status seems debatable.

“Those who claim that there are no Jews in Chechnya are far from being Jewish,” he said. And he presented his credentials: “I was sent to the Chechen Republic by the Council of Elders of the Jewish People to restore the Jewish community in the region. Only true believers know how right I am in my convictions.”

Okay then. Council of Elders of the Jewish People it is.

That is in no way the sort of name that would be invented by someone whose only knowledge of the Jewish people comes from copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Claiming to speak for the Jewish community of Chechnya, he joined Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov in condemning Israel’s actions at the Temple Mount, where the mosque is situated. Chechen Jews, Yunayev said, “wholeheartedly support” the sharp-worded rebuke of Israel by Kadyrov.

All zero of them.

“Nonsense, I doubt there are even any Jews left in Chechnya, let alone an organized Jewish community,” Tamara Rafailova Kahlon, an Israeli who was born in the Chechen capital of Grozny, told JTA on Friday. Her father, Rafoi Rafailov, heads an association of Chechen Jews in the city of Pyatigorsk, situated 150 miles west of Grozny in the North Caucasian Federal District. “They all left, I don’t know who this man speaks for,” she said.

None of the two remaining Jews in 2013.

The scarcity of Jews in Chechnya did not prevent Kadyrov’s office from announcing the opening of a synagogue in Grozny in 2013. The announcement prompted some head scratching, including by the Russian politician and journalist Vadim Beriashvili, who said at the time that he doubted the existence of a Jewish community who might use the synagogue.

“The Chechen authorities managed to find two Jews for the opening of the synagogue, but both refused to participate,” he reported in 2013. “The reasons for their refusal can only be guessed.”

And so you have the strange paradox of Islamic violence leading to a Jewish exodus. Meanwhile a sham Jewish community is maintained for political purposes. And its chief job is denouncing Israel.